Diablo 1, 2, 3 and 4

PC General Discussion
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Diablo 1
The atmosphere, mood, creepy ambient was amongst the main reason why I kept login over and over, of course the soundtrack was uplifting. Itemization was easy understand and wasn’t that easy to get, there’s few items I never got.
Begins bad and end worse, a dark fantasy tone that I would barely see in the chapters that will follow.

Diablo 2
A continuity with few upgrades that can earn the title of “Diablo 2.0”, not as dark as its predecessor, the general ambiance is lighter than D1. Much better technicalities. With LoD and few patches the endgame becomes meaningful. Monsters resistances & immunities will not allow a player to feel that every area becomes trivial, some zone will become easier and others preferably to avoid depending on the character’s build.

Diablo 3
The franchise takes a step away from its origin, stats become irrelevant except for 1 main stat, itemization is more straightforward, the number of skills/spells is reduced to a minimum.
Team play is massively improved, and game pace feels much better, season theme is introduced. I played some highly recommended character’s build to make my place in leaderboards, it’s been funny but only in teamplay.
I didn’t feel that I was playing in a dark fantasy game until RoS, even with this expansion and few seasons I took my distances from the game and never went back.

Diablo 4
I’m still waiting for improvement, I have close from 1400 hours played and for the most part I had a blast, the campaign is very well done, side quests are interesting, seasons has been entertaining so far, but once in the endgame about everything becomes trivial.
There’ absolutely no reasons to spend time in a specific zone beside the renown, the 5 main zones have plenty of awesome spots, but there’s nothing to gain as the loot is generic for every zone.
Helltides were good to do at first, ambient, music and visuals dragged me there more than the Living Steel, but after a while I became uninterested mainly because it’s too trivial, I have the feel that this part of the game is meant exclusively for fast grind in order to have mats for Duriel.
There’s the Gauntlet which is a Diablo 3 inspiration regarding character’s build, power and strategy, I do enjoy the Gauntlet but it’s mainly to test a build a like to play rather than being in competition.

Since a week I barely played, I’m fine with that, the season over and there nothing else to do, but something happened…
A player in my friend list asked me to carry him for Varshan, Grigoire and Duriel. It’s all good I can help even though this content is astonishingly boring, I even gave him plenty of mats for that matter.
After like 50 Duriel kill, I got sick of this loop, he’s commitment is way over mine, when he offered me real money to run him 100 more Duriel I began to wonder what was going on… questions popped in my head, such as:

  • Am I playing the wrong game?
  • Why has a specific item become THAT IMPORANT?
  • Should I go stick on a different game?

I’m not hoping for anything, I’ll get on season 4 and see how it goes, I feel a lack of depth in a way but nothing irreversible.
Am I alone to think and feel this way?

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I have not played since Season 2 and even then i got only like 80.

I don’t know anything about “farming duriel mats” that people keep talking about.

I am just waiting for minion fix, hopefully Season 4 is that

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Check the patch notes.

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I have nearly nothing positive to say about Diablo 3 (it is bad…), but this one I cant agree with. If anything, D3 is the Diablo game with the most skills, due to how much some runes altered skills.
Still not very impressive compared to some other A-RPGs though. But way better than the other Diablo games on this single issue.

Definitely agree with the view on D1 and D2.

Not trying to sound too harsh, but it kinda sounds like your friend is playing the wrong game. That does not sound healthy at all.

As for Duriel, yeah, really not a fan of that design. Neither the ‘repeat grind one single boss’, nor the 'hide away a bunch of the best items at a single boss.
D2 boss farming was soulcrushingly bad, but at least you could get most items from multiple different sources.
Duriel needs become one of many uber bosses. And uber bosses need to become one of many different paths to uber uniques/uniques.
On the positive side, that actually is one of the few areas where it seems like the game is moving in the right direction!

In general, the overworld is such a wasted potential imo. Helltides exist, but there need to be something that makes just running around the overworld (not a replacement of the overworld, which Helltides are), killing monsters, into a worthwhile endgame activity. With proper difficulty and rewards.

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I think one of the biggest appeals of Diablo 1, other than the atmosphere and lore, battling demons with a decent story and characters… basically, establishing a cool new franchise, was a lot of stuff was new to people. That was the first time I got into an online game and Battle.net was awesome compared to the Kali and Zone services we had to use for Warcraft 2 (it wasn’t until years later that Warcraft 2 Battle.net Edition finally released). It was also a lot of people’'s first experience with an ARPG or western style RPG.

It had a lot of the right pieces at the right time. The internet was still dial up but cable modems were right around the corner, the internet itself was just about to boom, battle.net was a real online gaming service, etc.

I’d say it was the same story with Ultima Online and EverQuest. First massive online RPGs with hundreds of thousands of players interacting with each other, EQ did it in 3D with level-based advancement and killing mobs with bosses. Then of course WoW streamlined everything which brought in a slew of new players, and they like WoW so much because it was their first MMO.

Being new, exciting and different holds a lot of weight and probably skews ones’ perspective.

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How old were you when you first played Diablo I & II?

You are looking at these games from a very different perspective, knowledge base and technological aspect.

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Uuuuuhhhh huhuhuhu, your friend went to the dark side really fast.
Damn, that uber must be really important to him.

Also, i did way over 100 runs easily for free last season.
In this one i didn’t make even 10 runs. Go figure.

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When I was playing Diablo 1, I found all unique items after a few years. In D4, the only Uber unique I haven’t got yet is the Grandfather sword. Maybe your friend was hunting for one of those that is missing in his collection of uniques or perhaps could be another reason.

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The problem with Ubers is that they’re target farmable, but only by a very small selection of bosses.

They’ve done this because effectively in D3 you couldn’t target farm, and people complained about that, because in D2 you could target farm, and as toxic as that was people somehow liked doing that, but hate doing the exact same thing for less time in D4.

They have target farming all over D4, but most of the time you don’t even really notice it.

Each mob type drops a specific item type, and each class has a higher chance of certain item types dropping. So if you want a particular item you would go to a specific class and kill a certain enemy. I just don’t think anyone does this because getting gear in D4 is pretty easy - so this is both a wasted opportunity and a somewhat toxic way of going about things.

Target farming in theory is nice, but in reality it’s boring, monotonous, and leads to player frustration.

Just increase the chance of ubers from whatever it is by 10x… So instead of 0.03% change to 0.3% or whatever, then maybe increase it slightly more for ALL bosses to 0.6% and level 200 bosses to 1.5%.

You will have more chance of finding them just playing and won’t feel like you HAVE to go and do 1 thing over and over, although the vast majority of people wanting to farm them will do level 200 pit or level 200 uber bosses; and that’s fine, because it’s just a ‘bonus’ chance to get them and people that can’t do those activities won’t feel like they have 0 chance.

Personally, I never played D1 or D2. I saw both just months after they released, and I thought they looked crap. I wasn’t even aware of D3 till RoS and played that solely as a single player without any info from any sites or other people for the first few years and thoroughly enjoyed it.

I’m sure the same would have been the case if I’d have picked up D4 without checking forums, knowing about streamers, maxroll, or any other site.

When there’s a known way to get powerful builds and you don’t use them you know you’re somewhat gimping yourself, so it makes the gameplay boring. If you weren’t aware of them, you’d probably play for much longer and work through the difficulty, learn the mechanics of everything in more depth and create your own builds, and the game would be great.

The internet ruins many things.

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:100:

Target farming, if done at all, should only be done like; Potion of “Increase chance to find gloves for 1 hour”, while doing normal content. Not by funneling people into a narrow piece of content they then need to redo until their eyes bleed.

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I was in my 20’s

Yes, D1 did catch the essential of Dark Fantasy in a unique way, it’s much like watching an old black & white horror movie. Tech available at this time did allow this kind of result with finesse. That doesn’t make D4 less Dark Fantasy, there’s plenty of nightmarish area that I would like to be in season content.

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Thats what I really like about unique items and games like Elden Ring and Darksouls. Bosses are pinnacle challenges but you always get the unqiue item. Boulders gate is like that also but both those games also have the story entwined in the experience. Diablo has become a system where nothing really matters until you reach the final step in the game.

I know its not the same genre of game but its a good system whereby you are always rewarded for accomplishment. Versus doing a boss 100+ times waiting for that 1% drop chance to ding.

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It’s because D1 was a gameplay first game, so was D2… A very small minority of people made it about farming and “reward first” approach, but that doesn’t make the game like that

D3 is a reward-first game, there are no IFs, BUTs, or ORs around it. Everything is done from final state as a starting phase standpoint instead

D4 started as a gameplay-first game but was unbalanced and unfinished. People mistook that for “D4 should be more rewarding”, and now we got what we got

I also think that devs aren’t confident, they’re waiting for Data to show them things. That’s why everything they design or add is “stiff like stone” and doesn’t move the needle (cause whatever they add they want to see the exact effect from doing that)

Which leads to late reactions and overreactions as well

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Yeah, I am keeping myself updated.

But skeptical still :smiley: i am just hoping that it’s good now

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AI is what it is, but it highly compensates in power.

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If you really have 1400 hours of gameplay, is normal become saturated with a game.

Any game have a lifetime, even the best ones, and is normal take a break and come back after some time.

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Release Date June 5 2023

Current Date May 7 2024

337 days or 8088 hours between those two.

1400 hours / 337 days = 4.15 hours per day.

D4 is half a full time job for you! There is going to come a time that you start to question the game when you play it this much.

Yes I would take a break:

Top 5 picks for you:

1] Fallout 4 but you have to make a melee only build on hardest difficulty (git gud) (TV show has reinvigorated love for this)
2] Fantasy General II - Best strategy hex game ever made
3] Red Dead Redemption 2 - its too gud
4] Wing Commander IV The Price of Freedom - One of last full motion video games ever made if you can get to work. Avail on GOG.
5] Tower of Time on impossible difficulty

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Oh god. I haven’t played Wing Commander in decades! I love some of the games from the 80s and 90s. They don’t make them the same anymore.

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I admit that I might have played a little too much :slightly_smiling_face:

I got Mortal Kombat 11, my playing time is healthier. I might just keep it this way for Season 4.

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Hard disagree.

Main stat, vitality, elemental damage to match skills, resistances/all resistance, critical %, critical damage, life on hit, life on kill, extra damage to skills, all incredibly important off the top of my head. Simplified, yes, but not made irrelevant. If you consider legendary abilities as stats (and you should) it gets quite involved.

Hard cap on 6 skills at any given time may be less than possible in D1 or D2 but I have never played a character in either of those over 100s of hours in each that required more than 6 at one time, (rarely even that many,) to excel. If you mean total skills, that has to account for the fact that there were different numbers of classes and MANY of the skills in D1 and D2 were redundant with no real difference between them other than base damage. And if you are including passives from D2, many of those concepts were rolled into the abilities themselves as well as legendary abilities. When you look at how transformative some runes could be in D3, the actual effective number of skills was massive.

D3 has its fair share of problems, but we need as a community to stop accusing it of things it actually didn’t do.